"What the hell?"
Salvatore's voice came out wrong, younger somehow, unfamiliar in his own ears as consciousness dragged him up from the dark. His eyes snapped open to a canopy of twisted branches overhead, leaves the color of dried blood filtering strange amber sunlight. The air tasted of ash and pine, nothing like the marble tomb where he'd died.
I died, Vincent shot me, I felt the bullets tear through my chest.
He sat up fast, too fast, and the world spun sideways before righting itself with nauseating slowness.
His hands, his hands were different, the skin smooth and unmarred by the scars he'd collected over forty-seven years of violence. No cigarette burns on his knuckles, no knife wound across his left palm from the Russo incident in '03. He turned them over and over, watching fingers that looked like his but couldn't be.
"This isn't real, this is dying, this is my brain shutting down and showing me dreams."
But the ground beneath him felt solid, the rough bark of the tree he'd been lying against scraped his back through his shirt. His shirt, not the custom Armani he'd worn to the banquet, but rough linen that smelled of smoke and earth. Even his body felt wrong, lighter, harder, like someone had stripped away twenty years.
A branch cracked somewhere in the forest, sharp as a gunshot in the stillness.
Salvatore was on his feet before thought caught up to instinct, his hand reaching for a weapon that wasn't there. The forest stretched in every direction, gnarled trees with bark like charred skin, undergrowth thick with thorns and strange purple flowers. No roads, no buildings, no sign of civilization in any direction.
Think, analyze, survive, same rules as always, different game board.
The light was wrong, not quite sunset, not quite dawn, stuck in some perpetual in-between that made his eyes ache.
He started walking, picking a direction at random because standing still was death, because movement was life, because forty-seven years of survival instinct demanded action. The ground beneath his boots, where had he gotten boots, crunched with fallen leaves and something that looked like bone fragments.
"Hello?" he called out, his voice swallowed by the dense trees, not even an echo returning to him.
The silence pressed against his eardrums like water pressure, absolute and suffocating.
No birds, no insects, no sound except my own breathing and footsteps, wrong, all wrong.
He'd been walking for maybe ten minutes when he heard it, a low growl that vibrated through the earth and up into his bones. Salvatore froze, every muscle locking tight, his eyes scanning the shadows between the trees. The growl came again, closer now, hungry.
"Show yourself," he said, keeping his voice level, authoritative, the same tone he'd used to command men.
The beast that emerged from the undergrowth was nothing from his world, nothing from any world that made sense.
It stood six feet at the shoulder, muscles rippling beneath fur that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Eyes like molten copper fixed on him with intelligence that was somehow worse than mindless hunger. Its jaw hung open, revealing teeth the length of daggers, saliva dripping and hissing where it hit the ground.
"Jesus Christ," Salvatore breathed, taking a step back, his mind racing through options, weapons, escape routes.
The wolf, because what else could he call it, lowered its head and charged with impossible speed.
Salvatore threw himself sideways, feeling claws rake across his ribs, tearing through linen and skin like paper. Pain exploded white-hot, familiar, almost welcome in its clarity. He hit the ground rolling, came up in a crouch, his hands finding a fallen branch thick as his forearm.
Not enough, never enough against something like that, but better than nothing.
The wolf circled, its movements fluid and patient, knowing it had already won, just playing with its food now.
"Come on then," Salvatore snarled, gripping the branch with both hands, feeling splinters dig into his too-smooth palms.
It lunged again, and this time Salvatore didn't dodge, he stepped in, swinging the branch with every ounce of strength in his unfamiliar body. The wood connected with the wolf's skull with a satisfying crack, but the creature barely flinched. Its jaws snapped shut inches from his face.
Going to die again, second time in one day, some kind of record probably.
Desperation clawed at his chest, hot and urgent, and something inside him answered, something that felt like ice in his veins.
His hands erupted with writhing shadows, black energy that seemed to devour the light around it, that smelled like grave dirt and winter nights. The wolf yelped, actually yelped, as the darkness arced from Salvatore's palms and into its flesh. Fur withered, skin blackened, but the beast kept coming.
"What the hell is this?" Salvatore shouted, the dark energy pouring out of him uncontrolled, wild, feeding on fear and rage in equal measure.
The wolf's claws caught him across the chest, four parallel lines of fire that knocked him backward into a tree.
Blood, his blood, too red, too bright, soaked through his shirt and ran hot down his stomach. The shadows around his hands sputtered and died, leaving him gasping, dizzy, the world tilting sideways. The wolf advanced slowly now, limping but determined.
Not like this, survived Vincent's betrayal just to die to some monster in a forest that shouldn't exist.
Rage, pure and primal, surged through him, and the darkness answered again, stronger this time, more focused.
His right hand blazed with black energy that made the air itself seem to rot, the branch still clutched in his left hand ignited with flames as dark as pitch. The wolf hesitated, intelligence warring with hunger in those copper eyes. Salvatore didn't give it time to decide.
He moved forward, not away, channeling everything he'd learned on the streets, every dirty fight, every desperate moment into savage motion.
The flame-wreathed branch caught the wolf across its injured side, and the creature howled, the sound almost human in its agony. Salvatore pressed the advantage, the black energy from his other hand searing into the beast's face, the darkness spreading like corruption through fur and flesh. The wolf thrashed, trying to retreat now, but Salvatore was beyond mercy.
You came at me, you made your choice, now you pay the price.
He drove the burning branch deep into the wolf's throat, the dark energy from his hand following it in, consuming the creature from the inside out.
The wolf's body convulsed once, twice, then went still, smoke rising from its ruined corpse as the black flames ate away at what remained. The smell of burnt meat filled the air, acrid and nauseating. Salvatore stood over it, chest heaving, hands still wreathed in dying shadows.
"What am I?" he whispered to the silent forest, watching the black energy fade from his fingertips like smoke dissipating in wind.
His legs gave out without warning, adrenaline crash hitting him like a truck, and he collapsed next to the wolf's smoking remains.
The last thing he saw before unconsciousness claimed him again was his own blood mixing with the beast's, pooling on the ash-covered ground. The forest swallowed his awareness like a mouth closing over prey.